Khakpour’s residency represents the third in a series of writers hosted jointly by the CWA and MENA. In 2016, Rabih Alameddine, the Lebanese-American novelist, was in residence for the spring quarter. During the spring quarter 2017, Moroccan playwright, novelist, and journalist Driss Ksikes was in residence at CWA and MENA. All writers in the series teach writing workshops for Northwestern students, share their own new work publicly in readings and performances, and lecture in public forums on a range of topics.

“This collaboration between the Center for the Writing Arts and MENA allows us to bring leading writers from the Middle East, North Africa, and writers of the Arab and Iranian diaspora to campus and for our students and community to engage closely with them in a variety of settings and formats,” said Brian Edwards, MENA director and Crown Professor in Middle East Studies.

“The Iranian-American writer Porochista Khakpour is one of the most compelling writers of her generation and has a unique literary voice,” Edwards said. “Those who do not yet know her work will find themselves riveted by her fiction and essays.”

Porochista Khakpour is the author of two award-winning novels, Sons and Other Flammable Objects(Grove/Atlantic, 2007) and The Last Illusion (Bloomsbury, 2014), and a forthcoming memoir entitled Sick, to be published by HarperCollins in May 2018.

Sons and Other Flammable Objects was a New York Times “Editor’s Choice,” a Chicago Tribune“Fall’s Best” selection, and a 2007 California Book Award winner, and was shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing shortlist.

The Last Illusion was a Kirkus Best Book of 2014, a Buzzfeed Best Fiction Book of 2014, an NPR Best Book of 2014, and an Electric Literature Best Book of 2014. It was also one of io9.com’s “Mind-Blowing Science Fiction and Fantasy Books to Watch Out For in 2015,” Flavorwire’s “50 Excellent Fabulist Novels Everyone Should Read,” and the Huffington Post’s “30 Books You NEED to Read in 2014.”

In addition to her novels, Khakpour’s essays has appeared in Harper’s, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Daily Beast, The Village Voice,Bookforum,VICE,The Paris Review, Slate, Salon, Poets & Writers, The Rumpus, Guernica,Bidoun, Granta.com, Newyorker.com, and many other publications. Her recent essay “How to Write Iranian-America, or The Last Essay,” published in May 2017 at Catapult, has garnered significant attention in the past month since it was published.

Khakpour is the recipient of a 2012 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in Creative Writing (Prose). In 2014, she was one of Dazed’s “Top 10 American Writers You Need to Read This Year,” one of Buzzfeed’s “32 Essential Asian-American Writers You Need to Be Reading,” a Buzzfeed Community/OpenRoadMedia “10 Amazing Female Novelists Under 50,” and one of Entropy’s “Literary Advocates” in 2014 and 2016.

She has taught creative writing and literature at Bard (where she was Writer-in-Residence from 2014-2017), as well as several other leading universities and colleges including Columbia, Johns Hopkins, Wesleyan, Sarah Lawrence, and the University of Leipzig, where she was a Picador Guest Professor. She is currently faculty at the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA.

Writers in Residence

Winter Quarter 2018 Writer in Residence

ALEX KOTLOWITZ is perhaps best known for his national bestseller, There Are No Children Here: The Story of Two Boys Growing Up in the Other America, which the New York Public Library selected as one of the 150 most important books of the twentieth century. Alex’s nonfiction stories, which one critic wrote “inform the heart”, have appeared in print, radio and film. From his documentary, The Interrupters, to his stories in The New York Times Magazine and on public radio’s This American Life, he’s been honored in all three mediums.